I remember watching the BBC programme that introduced Benjamin Yusopov’s
Viola Tango Rock Concerto, performed by its dedicatee Maxim Vengerov.
The composer and the violinist were firm friends - sonata colleagues and eminent
performers - and Yusupov had already dedicated his 1998 Violin Concerto and
his 2003 piece Maximum to Vengerov. It’s not so surprising that
Vengerov has called the Viola Tango Rock Concerto ‘the greatest
concerto written for viola’ though the rest of us, listening in our dull,
old-fashioned ways to our Telemann, and Walton, and all the others, may possibly
have other ideas.

The performance in this DVD comes from a Colombian performance given in 2009.
Its star performer is the Portuguese violist Anibal Dos Santos, who was actually
born in Caracas in 1963, later studying with Joseph de Pasquale in Philadelphia.
He gave the North and South American premiere of this concerto with these forces
in May 2007. The filmed performance too k place two years later, with the composer
present.

I was worried at first. The picture was murky and rather opaque, but then es
ward Licht, and all was well. Dos Santos is a big, hulking man, bald, stubbly,
and wearing an outsize black jacket. You probably wouldn’t want to disagree
with him if he told you that, yes, Yusupov’s was the greatest viola
concerto ever written and Walton’s was just a Mediterranean jeu d’esprit.
He doesn’t look like the kind of chap to be trifled with. I’ve seen
Alpine ridges more forgiving.

The camera work is broadly unobtrusive. It shows the hard working orchestra
and the various extra instrumentalists - the rock trio of electric guitar, electric
bass and drums, the accordion and the acoustic guitar. Yusopov specified Bandoneon
but I assume the acoustic guitar is an acceptable substitute, and I can’t
now recall if the Vengerov performance had which of the two instruments. The
Bandoneon makes sense for the Tango in a Piazzollan kind of way. The dour opening
is well controlled by conductor Ricardo Jaramillo who beats time, baton-less,
in a very mathematical kind of way - more quadratic equations than post-Shostakovich.

The infiltrated baroque figures are always haunting - but then they always tend
to be, in my experience, in whatever medium - but it’s when Dos Santos
puts down his conventional viola for the third movement and picks up his groovy
electric model that the floor shown begins. Lights strobe, the rock trio kicks
in, and things go back to 1967. The music then reverts to melancholy and the
(conventional) viola passages get more and more strenuous and powerful. We then
fade to black. Dos Santos leaves. The winds pipe up, introducing the accordion;
this gap allows Dos Santos to unpeel his black jacket and to be manoeuvred into
a new red one, the size of a small principality. On comes slinky dancer and
choreographer Gina Medina. Dos Santos, grizzled, vast, bald, red-jacketed, sullen,
heavy as a broken heart, lumbers around her. She keeps her Tango kicks to a
minimum. The poor man has been slogging his guts out for nearly 40 minutes and
here he is having to dance a Tango.

At the end Yusupov comes on to take applause, with the performers, from the
mixed age ranged audience who are commendably enthusiastic. I should add finally
that we hear the full six movement version including the Postludium and
Go Tango. Has anyone ever played the cut-down version?

The concerto is a kind of multimedia event. Its tone is predominantly rather
dark - darker than you’d imagine from the jolly-sounding title - but relieved
by intense outbursts of pummelling rock back beat and Tango intensity. I’ve
never seen the Tango section really work, though - not even with Vengerov.